Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

the congregations is composed of artisans.’

In this he was merely echoing the

common opinion of middle-class observers, from Thomas Chalmers in 1821 to

Mayhew in 1851. As Engels put it in 1844,

All bourgeois writers are agreed that the workers have no religion and do

not go to church. Exceptions to this are the Irish, a few of the older

workers and those wage-earners who have one foot in the middle-class

camp—overlookers, foremen, and so on. Among the mass of the working-

class population, however, one nearly always finds an utter indifference to

religion.

Engels’ verdict is amply confirmed by the bourgeois writers themselves and by

modern studies of the churches’ relations with the Victorian working class.

do not have to accept the (by then) class-ridden views of contemporaries—there

was proportionately as much conscious unbelief, if not indifference, in the

Victorian middle class as amongst the workers—to recognize that church-going

had declined most in the great towns and amongst the urban working class. This

could have been proved from the Census returns, but was not, Mann preferring to

rely on subjective impressions. The following table attempts to rectify the

omission. It shows two broad trends: first, the larger the town the smaller the

proportion of the population attending any place of worship; and, secondly, the

larger the town, with the exception of London, the smaller the proportion of

Anglican to all attenders. The exception to the second trend is important, for

London was not then an industrial town in the new sense of the word, and if

space permitted it could be shown that other large towns of more traditional

social structure, such as Bristol, Exeter and Norwich, followed the London

pattern of Anglican majority attendance. But there were few exceptions to the

first trend: the majority in all the great towns, as contemporaries put it, were

‘pagan’. And, since the working class made up four-fifths of their population, the

majority of non-attenders were working-class, especially adults. As Edward

Miall put it in 1849,

Ibid., pp. ci–cii.

The Census reporter, Horace Mann, p. clii, used a method of estimating attenders

(taking the whole morning attendance plus half the afternoon plus one-third of the

evening) designed to favour the Church of England, where the most popular service

was in the morning, as against the Non-Anglicans, whose largest services were held

in the evening, and he succeeded in giving a slight majority of attenders to the

Church. On any other method, such as the two-thirds attendance adopted here, the

Non-Anglicans retain the majority of attenders as of attendances.

Ibid., pp. clii, clviii.

Ibid., p. clviii.

164 THE BIRTH OF CLASS

The bulk of our manufacturing population stands aloof from our Christian

institutions…an immense majority of those who in childhood attend our

Sabbath schools, neglect throughout the period of manhood all our

ordinary appliances of spiritual instruction and culture.

The reasons for this alienation of a large part of the working class not only from

the Church but from all the churches were accurately summarized by Mann, and

they were entirely social

TABLE 4

ESTIMATED ANGLICAN AND NON-ANGLICAN, ATTENDERS, 30 MARCH 1851,

IN GROUPS OF TOWNS BY POPULATION SIZE, ENGLAND AND WALES

Size of

Towns

Populati

Anglican

Attender

s No.

% Non-

Anglican

Attender

s No.

% Total No. %

London 2,362,

236

338,617 14.3 260,472 11.1 599,089 25.4

100,000+

(8 towns)

1,268,

507

143,808 11.3 201,757 15.9 345,565 27.2

50,000–

100,000

(17

towns)

1,105,

421

154,155 13.9 236,513 21.4 390,668 35.3

20,000–

50,000

(34

towns)

1,033,

964

197,555 19.1 210,897 20.4 408,452 39.5

All

towns 20,

000 +

5,770,

128

834,135 14.5 909,639 15.7 1,743,

774

30–2

All

places

20,000−

12,156,

681

2,694,

232

22.2 2,826,

038

23.2 5,520,

270

45.4

England

and

Wales

17,927,

609

3,528,

367

19.7 3,735,

677

20.2 7,264,

044

40.5

Op. cit., p. 141.

Cf. K.S.Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (1963);

E.R.Wickham, Church and People in an Industrial City (1957).

E.Miall, The British Churches in relation to the British People (1849); Wickham, op.

cit., pp. 118–19.

THE BIRTH OF CLASS 165

Size of

Towns

Populati

Anglican

Attender

s No.

% Non-

Anglican

Attender

s No.

% Total No. %

SOURCE: Abstracted from Census of England and Wales, 1851: Religious Worship,

Tables, pp. cclii et seq.; the number of attenders is taken as two-thirds of the

total attendances during the day.

ones: the feeling that churches were for the well-to-do and respectable—‘the

labouring myriads have…no desire to mingle with persons of a higher grade’; the

supposed indifference of the churches to the social conditions of the poor;

distrust of the motives of proselytizing ministers; and the poverty and

overcrowding of the slums. ‘The masses, therefore, of our large and growing towns

—connected by no sympathetic tie with those by fortune placed above them—

form a world apart, a nation by themselves; divided almost as effectively from

the rest as if they spoke another language or inhabited another land. What Dr.

Chalmers calls “the influence of locality” is powerless here: the area is too

extensive and the multitude too vast.’

In other words, where dependency was weakened, Anglican Church-going

declined; where it was dead, church-going of all kinds decayed. Emancipation

from both paternal and religious discipline went hand in hand with urbanization.

As a later Bishop of London accurately expressed it, ‘It is not that the Church of

God has lost the great towns; it has never had them….’

The migrating workers

moved from the countryside, where the social pressures were in favour of going

to Church rather than ‘lose everything, work and all’,

to a small town where the

social pressures were in favour of going to chapel, or to a large one where they were

against going at all.

This ‘religious mobility’, if so it can be termed, was not an innovation

introduced by industrialism. The natural corollary of the religious ‘sandwich’ of

the old society was the progressive change in denominational allegiance as one

moved up—or down —the social hierarchy.

What was new in the Industrial

Revolution, apart from the acceleration and increased scale of change, was the

development for the first time not merely of scepticism or atheism in isolated

individuals or groups but of entire social layers in which non-allegiance to any

church was the norm and adherence the exception. Nor was this confined to the

slums of the great towns, to the depressed bottom layer of paupers, street-folk

and semi-criminals who, like Mayhew’s costermongers or Dickens’ brickmaker,

never went to church until they were buried.

It spread to large areas of the urban

Census, 1851, Religious Worship, pp. clviii, cxxviii.

A.F.Winnington-lngram, Work in Great Cities (1896), p. 22.

Engels, op. cit., p. 304.

Cf. chap. ii, § 1, above.

166 THE BIRTH OF CLASS

working class up to the craftsman level, and even affected a considerable section

of the middle class. Indeed, it helps to explain one of the sharpest paradoxes of

the nineteenth century, the emergence, in the midst of the greatest revival of

religious faith since the middle ages, of the agnosticism or indifference which

was to be the dominant spiritual position in modern Britain.

Both can be explained in terms of emancipation from the integrated pattern of

socio-religious behaviour of the old society. The first effect of emancipation was

a sharpening of belief and discipline by reaction from the easy-going habits of

the latitudinarian Church of the old society, and, as it in turn revived, in

competition with it and with other sects. But the second effect, reached almost

immediately in some of the emancipated, only by stages in others, and not at all

in the rest, was alienation from all organized forms of religious belief and

worship. And the existence of numerous competing sects, which was more

characteristic of Britain than of any other European country, provided a sequence

of stepping stones by which the emancipated individual could make his way from

the Church to any position of Christian belief, or at last out into the great desert

of unbelief on the other side of the Jordan. This was well recognized by a

contemporary, who shrewdly connected it with industrialism: ‘the same spirit

which has produced “free trade” in articles of commerce advocates likewise a

free trade in religion.’ The resultant division of the Church into competing

parties, High and Low, has unsettled the faith of its adherents who

wander forth…never to return. In this manner thousands, and tens of

thousands, have been lost to the Church of England; for, so numerous are

now the various sects of dissenters, and so nicely are the shades of

distinction drawn, that if a man once begin to doubt any article of belief,

fastidious indeed must he be if he cannot find some one congregation

whose notions accord with his own.

There were in fact two sequences of stepping stones from the Church (three, if

we include the lovers’ leap from High Church to Rome, but this was more an

internal upper-class phenomenon than a species of social alienation). Upstream,

as it were, there was for the middle ranges of society the ancient sequence of Old

Dissent. Downstream, for the emancipated workers there was the new sequence

of proliferating Methodist connexions.

Old Dissent had long formed a sequence of steps, but for most of the era of the

old society they had been steps arranged in a social hierarchy. A member of the

lower orders who raised himself by diligence and frugality to the level of an

Mayhew, op. cit., (1851, I. 21–2; C.Dickins, Bleak House (1853), the brickmaker to

Mrs. Pardiggle.

[J.F.Dalton], ‘The Influence of the Church of England in Society’, Blackwood’s, 1830,

XXVII. 700–1.

THE BIRTH OF CLASS 167

independent craftsman or shopkeeper of the lower middle ranks would probably

mark his partial emancipation by joining one of the Independent congregations

or the Baptists. If he prospered and rose still higher in the social scale, he would

be likely to become a Presbyterian or Quaker. Finally, if he became so successful

as to be able to buy an estate and retire from business he or his family would return

to the Anglican fold. During and after the Industrial Revolution this rising

sequence continued—as late as the 1850’s, for example, the last of the famous

Quaker dynasty of ironfounders, the Darbys of Coalbrookdale, retired from

business and built an Anglican church.

At the same time, a more horizontal

sequence developed, though after an almost false start. In the late eighteenth

century the strain of ‘rational religion’ which produced the scepticism of Hume,

Bentham and most of the Utilitarians profoundly affected the leading

Presbyterians, above all Priestley, Price and Robinson, the apostles of ‘Rational

Dissent’, who led a large part of their followers into the Socinian wilderness of

Unitarianism. In the 1790’s they were persecuted both for their heresy and for

their political sympathy with the Godless Revolution in France, which the

Government and its supporters saw as connected. Price and Robinson died,

Priestley fled to America, and the bulk of their followers deserted Rational

Dissent for politically safe Baptist and Congregationalist havens. Unitarianism,

however, survived, to become in the nineteenth century the main link between

‘enlightened’ Dissent and those ‘secular Dissenters’ outside the pale of

Christianity, the sceptical Utilitarians and, later, the agnostic Positivists. The link

with the first is symbolized by the political alliance between the Mills and the

Rev. W.J.Fox, editor of the Monthly Repository; with the second, by George

Eliot and her circle, including the phrenologists Charles Bray and George

Combe, and the Positivists Frederic Harrison and E.S.Beesly. In the 1820’s it

was a short step from Unitarianism to sceptical Utilitarianism. By mid-century it

was an even shorter one, often via phrenology, from Unitarianism to the deeply

moral, religiose agnosticism of the Positivists.

Methodism formed a longer and more evenly spaced sequence of stepping

stones from the Church to agnosticism. At the hither end the Wesleyanism of the

original Connexion, as Tory, loyalist, politically quietist and theologically

Anglican as Wesley himself, was the shortest possible step for the timidest

emancipated worker to take. Then, as alienation increased both with time and

social distance, Methodism threw up a resting place at every stride, each, for a

time at least, more radical than the parent stock: the Kilhamites or New

Methodist Connexion of 1797, the ‘Ranters’ or Primitive Methodists of 1810, the

Bryanites or Bible Christians of 1815, the Wesleyan Methodist Association of

1834, and a host of ‘Tent Methodists’, ‘Magic Methodists’ of Delamere Forest,

‘Quaker Methodists’ of Warrington, ‘Independent Methodists’ of Macclesfield,

A.Raistrick, Dynasty of Ironfounders: The Darbys and Coalbrookdale (1953), pp. 263,

270, 273.

168 THE BIRTH OF CLASS

Barkerites of Bradford, and followers of the fiery Rev. J.R.Stephens of Ashton-

under-Lyne.

It thus became possible for working men to desert the Church

without plunging into theological or political radicalism, and then, as

disenchantment and political involvement increased, to leave or be expelled from

the more conservative for the more radical connexions, until perhaps they passed

finally into secularism or indifference. In this way, for example, Joseph Barker,

the Bradford Chartist leader imprisoned in 1848, began as a Wesleyan lay

preacher, left to become a travelling preacher and minister for the New

Connexion, which expelled him for his Chartist activities in 1841, when twenty-

nine chapels and four thousand, three hundred and forty-eight ‘Barkerites’

followed him, and, finally, after many spiritual vicissitudes in England and

America, found a congenial home in Primitive Methodism.

William Lovett

traversed the whole distance, beginning as a Wesleyan, joining the Bryanites,

and ending as an Owenite who agreed with the sceptic Francis Place that ‘this is

the best world of which I have any hope.’

Owenism was the final step for many working men. It was not a religion, in spite

of the messianic character of Owen himself, but with its millenarian zeal for co-

operative heavens on the (by then) capitalist earth it represented for many the

ultimate emancipation from both organized religion and the existing social

system. Curiously enough, there was in Owenism a half-step for the nostalgic

Christian. Though many members of the working-class movement were

aggressive secularists in the tradition of Paine, through the publications of Carlile

and the working-class press of the 1820’s and 1830’s, many were not prepared to

abandon religion altogether. For these there was the spiritualism which attracted

and finally converted Owen, his son, and many of their followers, including

William and Mary Howitt, Gerald Massey the Chartist poet, John Culpan the

Halifax Chartist, and so on.

And spiritualism was the ideal religion for the

emancipated working class: a religion with practically no theology, clergy or

organization, completely free from any taint of dependency. It was to the

working class what Unitarianism was to the middle class, the final stepping stone

between Christianity and unbelief.

It was not necessary for very large numbers, either of the middle or the

working class, to remain long on any one stone. Indeed, many were influenced

Phrenology had peculiar philosophical and theological attractions for intellectuals who

found Christianity no longer credible but still required the emotional support of a ‘religion

of humanity’. It played an important part in the ritual of Comte’s Positivist Church, where

adherents were expected to touch the three (phrenological) organs of love, order and

progress. George Eliot took it seriously enough to have her head shaved for her friend

Charles Bray to read her ‘bumps’. Cf. Royden Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in

Labour and Politics, 1861 to 1881 (1965), p. 314; J.F.C.Harrison, Learning and Living,

1790–1960 (1961), pp. 114–17.

Cf. E.P.Thompson, op. cit., p. 388; Census, 1851, Religious Worship, pp. lxxf.

THE BIRTH OF CLASS 169

by them who never touched them. As a working man who had lived through the

intellectual and spiritual upheavals of the transition remarked,

it was not the number of converts made by the Owenites, Barkerites, or

Unitarians, but the influence each and all had on the various religious

bodies, the thousands of pamphlets scattered about, lent, given and sold,

and the every-day discussions carried on in the village [of Pudsey, near

Leeds], that made people’s minds more liberal and rational without their

being aware of it.

Emancipation, in fact, was a negative process: it left men free to choose their

belief, or non-belief, as best they could. Some—and the Religious Census shows

that their numbers were much larger than alarmist contemporaries believed—

chose to remain within the bosom of the Church, and these ‘unemancipated’ or

‘loyalist’ middle and working-class Anglicans were to become an important

factor in the politics of the viable class society of mid-Victorian England. Others

expressed their emancipation by fervent adherence to a range of sects from the

quietist Quakers or Wesleyans to the hysterical followers of Richard Brothers

and Joanna Southcott. Still others—often the same people in a later phase—

expressed it via religious indifference or assertive atheism. Whatever form it

took, it represented a rupture of the bonds of patronage and dependency which

held the old society together, and prepared the way for the birth of class.

By an apt if irrational instinct the old ruling élite recognized this, at least from

the French Revolution onwards, and hit out indiscriminately at the sects,

however loyalist they might be. All Dissenters were tarred with the same anti-

patriotic brush. Price, Priestley and the Rational Dissenters, and by extension all

the old denominations, were bracketed with Paine and the Jacobins; while even

the, at that time Tory, Methodists, who never tired of declaring their ‘dutiful

attachment to their King and Country’ were accused of upholding ‘a system

which tended to overthrow Church and State.’

The reason is significant: defence

of the Church, which in the eighteenth century had been in greater danger from

aristocratic Deists and Sceptics than from the Dissenters, became in the age of

alienation defence of the alienating class. As usual, Pitt spoke for the whole class

when he declared ‘the Church of England, as by law established, to be so

essential a part of the constitution that whatever en-dangered it would necessarily

Joseph Barker, History and Confessions of a Man…(Wortley, 1845), Teachings of

Experience…(1869) and Life of Joseph Barker, Written by Himself (ed. J.T. Barker,

1880); Joseph Lawson, Progress in Pudsey during the Last Sixty Years

(Stanningly, 1887), pp. 76–82; J.F.C.Harrison, op. cit., pp. 45–6, 164–5.

W.Lovett, Life and Struggles…(1876), pp. 7, 22; Wallas, Place, p. 364, Lovett to

Place, 16 January 1837.

Cf. J.F.C.Harrison, op. cit., p. 171.

170 THE BIRTH OF CLASS

affect the security of the whole.’

The counter-attack on the sects served the

double purpose of provoking the middle ranks and lower orders still further

along the path of emancipation and, by awakening the defensive class-

consciousness of the aristocracy, of helping to transform the integrated élite of the

old society into the segregated upper class of the new. Thus religion played its

part even in the creation of the upper class, and well deserves to be called the

midwife of all three major classes.

THE DELAYED BIRTH

As long as the Great French Wars lasted, patriotism reinforced paternalism to

hold overt class conflict in check. There were of course increasing social strains,

which came near to bursting point towards the end. War enriched the few and

put almost intolerable burdens of taxation and high prices on the many, in a way

which seemed to some contemporaries to be not inevitable but the artificial

result of the Government’s policy of paying for it by means of inflationary loans

rather than by taxing the rich. This inequitable policy, and the still more

inequitable deflationary resumption of cash payments in 1819, which increased

both the real value of the funds held by the few and the real burden of taxation of

the many, were to play an important part in exacerbating class conflict after the

Wars.

Meanwhile, however, after the very effective suppression of the ‘Jacobins’

between 1793 and 1797, opposition to the war was largely confined to a

dwindling group of aristocratic Whigs, led until his death by Fox and thereafter

by Earl Grey, who paid the price for their unpopular attitude in almost

permanent exclusion from office. Protests from the middle ranks and lower

orders were limited to specific economic grievances and had little or no general

political import. The most typical of such protests were the agitation of 1810–12

by the merchants and industrialists against the Orders in Council forbidding

exports to Napoleon’s Europe, and, leaving aside the running campaign from

1802 to 1814 noticed above for the revival of Tudor wage and labour regulation,

the Luddite riots of the framework knitters against starvation wages and other

industrial mal-practices of 1812–14.

The only general political protest was

Cartwright and Wyvill’s revival from 1812 onwards of the old campaign for

Parliamentary Reform, in the shape of the Union and Hampden Clubs. But these

J.Lawson, op. cit., pp. 80–1; ibid., p. 171.

Cf. U.R.Q.Henriques, Religious Toleration in England, 1787–1833 (1961), chap. iii;

Wearmouth, op. cit., pp. 54–60.

Parliamentary History of England, 1796–7, III. 557; Wearmouth, op. cit., p. 56.

i.e. not against new machinery as such; cf. E.J.Hobsbawm, Labouring Men (1964),

chap. ii, ‘The Machine Breakers’.

THE BIRTH OF CLASS 171

were ‘highly respectable’

—that is, they did not assume the character of a class

attack upon the aristocracy, at least until the War was over.

It was the peace which brought the old society to bed of the new. The

gestation had been long and the delay unnatural. The pressures of industrialism

and urbanization, of aristocratic provocation and reaction from below, had long

been building up for a birth, but were held in check not only by the womb of

dependency but also by the artificial pressure of the patriotic war effort. The

post-war distress, with its acute competition for income and unrequited demand

for positive remedies, brought the natal pressures of industrialism and

resentment of aristocratic abdication to bursting point. One opposing pressure,

patriotism, being removed, the other, dependency, failed to hold, and the bawling

child came tumbling forth.

In other words, it was in the first five years of peace, between Waterloo and

the Queen’s Trial, that the vertical antagonisms and horizontal solidarities of

class came for the first time, clearly, unmistakably, and irrevocably, to supplant

the vertical connections and horizontal rivalries of dependency and interest.

The essence of class is not merely antagonism towards another class or classes

but organized antagonism with a nationwide appeal to all members of one broad

social level. By this definition the working class almost sprang into existence

with the Parliamentary Reform movement of 1816–19. ‘In 1816 began a popular

agitation for Radical Reform which in three years almost rose to revolution

point, and then subsided as suddenly as it had sprung up.’

It took its leaders

completely by surprise. Cobbett, who had been hammering at Reform for a

dozen years without effect but who now characteristically took credit for the first

appeal to the working class, avowed: ‘The labouring classes seemed as if they

had never heard a word on politics before. The effect on their minds was like

what might be expected to be produced on the eyes of one bred up in the dark

and brought out all of a sudden into broad daylight.’

It was not the leadership which gave the movement its working-class

character: Cobbett was the nearest to a working man amongst them, while Orator

Hunt was an independent occupier farming his own land who prided himself on

being a gentleman, Sir Charles Wolseley was an officer and a seventh baronet,

and Sir Francis Burdett was an aristocrat as snobbish as his wife, one of the

banking Coutts, was rich. It was, first of all, the platform of the movement,

household and then universal suffrage, and, secondly, the means, vast mass

meetings with democratic resolutions carried by acclamation, both of which

alienated practically everybody but the emancipated working class. On behalf of

Butler, op. cit., p. 27.

Ibid.

Political Register, 2 August 1817, referring to the Weekly Register, 2 November 1816,

‘An Address to the Journeymen and Labourers of England, Wales and Scotland’, which,

published separately at 2d., sold 200,000 copies.

172 THE BIRTH OF CLASS

the aristocratic Reformers Grey dissociated himself completely, shuddering at

‘the principle universal suffrage which is the only one which will be tolerated by

the leaders of the popular party, or rather of the Mob, or of the the means by

which they are endeavouring to effect their object, which certainly is not Reform

but Revolution,’ and he declared he must ‘avoid even the intercourse of private

society with them whom I consider to have degraded themselves from the

character of gentlemen.’

On behalf of the middle-class Radicals Brougham

made fun in Parliament of the ‘antiquarian research’ and ‘wild and mischievous

schemes’ of the popular movement.

The unprecedented means were even more

offensive to Tories bred in the old society, like Canning, who clearly recognized

their socially disruptive significance:

When…it is asserted that such meetings were never before suppressed, the

simple answer is, they were never before attempted to be holden.

They were in contradiction to the spirit of the law, which prescribed a corporate

character, that is, meetings of the freemen or inhabitants of a particular place or

community, not open meetings of rootless individuals:

Just so at the beginning of the French Revolution: the first work of the

Reformers was to loosen every established political relation, every legal

holding of man to man, to destroy every corporation, to destroy every

subsisting class of society, and to reduce the nation into individuals, in

order, afterwards to congregate them into mobs.

But that the movement was not one of rootless individuals is sufficiently testified

by the evidence both of its working-class members and of the Government which

tried to suppress it. Samuel Bamford, the ‘weaver-poet’, one of the Lancashire

delegates to the great national convention of Reformers at the Crown and Anchor

Tavern in January 1817 and leader of the Middle ton contingent at Peterloo,

gives chapter and verse for the awakening of the working-class political

awareness by Cobbett and the Radical press, for the consciously working-class

Hampden Clubs and district and national meetings of delegates, and for the

quasi-military drilling of contingents to the mass meetings which so alarmed the

Government.

Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, bombarded by reports from

J.P.s, military commanders and informers of secret oaths, midnight drillings,

purchase of arms, and the date—three times over—of the planned rising, was

convinced of the existence of an ‘organized system of rebellion.’

Earl Grey to Sir Robert Wilson, the Radical general, 1819; Butler, op. cit., pp. 34–

Speech in House of Commons, 14 February 1817, Blackwood’s, 1817, I. 106.

THE BIRTH OF CLASS 173